PPI #79: How to Complete Your Work 5x Faster

Today I'm going to teach you three hacks that you can use to complete your work up to five times faster. That means instead of working five hours on something, what if you could be getting it done in just one hour? And in fact, if you don't learn these techniques, if you don't learn these hacks, you're going to be just not reaching your full potential in whatever it is that you're doing.

Hi, I'm Eric Partaker and I help CEOs, entrepreneurs, leaders, reach their full potential, close that gap, and whatever it is that they're doing in both their businesses and their lives. And today I'm going to tell you about three hacks that you can use to complete your work up to five times faster. And what's not to like about that? So make sure you stick around for the whole video so you can employ all three techniques to upgrade your game. So, number one, the number one technique to increase the rate at which you work is, is based on the Pareto principle. So the Pareto principle Simply states that 20% of the causes typically lead to 80% of the effects. Or said in another way, 20% of the effort leads to 80% of the results. Now, how you can employ this in your business, in life, is by looking for the leverage points. Not all things are created equal. There'll be certain tasks or certain activities or which will yield a disproportionate share of the results that you're seeking. Let me give you an example. So one of the things that I've done in my career is I built up a chain of restaurants. And in this chain of restaurants, it was a Mexican chain of restaurants. What we did was we focused on flavor. So out of all the things that we could have focused on to drive guest satisfaction, we had the ambience, we had the staff, we had the food. But what we decided to do is go within food and specifically focus on the flavor. We knew that 20% of all of our effort would be consumed by this focus, but that it would yield 80% of the guest satisfaction. So what I would encourage you to do with your business, for example, is to ask out of all the things in your offering that you're offering to a customer, to a guest, what are the 20% of things that drive 80% of the client or the customer or the guest satisfaction? And really focus in and zero in on that 20%. Because instead of spending your time doing all those other things, you could be just focusing your time on that which is going to deliver the biggest bang for the buck. Now, another thing that you can do. So first thing is 8020 rule, right? Practice that. That will help you complete your work up to five times faster and also significantly magnify the results that you're getting. The other thing that you can do is focus on Parkinson's Law, or what I mean is be aware of Parkinson's Law and make sure that you're leveraging that within your work. Now, what is Parkinson's Law? Parkinson's law simply states that work will expand to fill the time given for its completion. Now we all know this. Maybe there's been a project that you've worked on recently or a presentation you're trying to complete, or a piece of work, whatever it may have been, and you suddenly didn't have enough time to get that done, or you're running up against a very, very tight deadline and suddenly instead of having three days to do it, or three hours, maybe you only had one hour, but you still got it done. That's Parkinson's Law in action. Work will expand to fill the time given for its completion. So we can use this to our advantage by proactively restricting the amount of time we give ourselves to complete task. I, I remember the first time I really experienced the power of this. And I was. We had just finished a board meeting with our company and it was the next day and I was thinking about writing out the meeting notes for the board meeting. And this is something that I always used to sit on for quite some time. So I would dread about the length of the notes and how long it would take to compile them and get them up. And so I was starting to go into that mode again. And I remember I looked at the clock and I. And I saw that it was, I remember it was 5:39 and I had a call at 6pm and I thought to myself, I wonder if I could get these board meeting notes out in just 21 minutes. And so I gave it a try. I said I had 21 minutes to finish these no matter what. Now these weren't the most in depth notes I've ever done, but I did get them done in 21 minutes because I applied Parkinson's law and that was absolutely doing work at five times the normal speed that I'm accustomed to doing now. The last thing that you can do. So what have we talked about so far? We talked about working up to five times faster by employing the 8020 rule, right? So what are the 20% of the things that you could be doing for 80% of the results such that for example, instead of spending five hours on something, you spending one hour. Then we talked about the Parkinson's law, so restricting the time that you give yourself to complete tasks, because you do this all the time when you have to rush against a tight deadline anyways. And then number three, the number three three thing that you can do is once you've taken an 8020 effort on something, so rather than try to get something 100% perfect, what I mean is, once you've given something an 8020 effort where you put in 20% of the effort to get a good enough 80% result, rather than you trying to fill that last remaining 20%, I highly encourage you to delegate it to someone else. Delegate it to someone else on your team, ask them to focus on that remaining 20%. And actually you can even ask them to 8020 that remaining 20%. Let's look. I want you to put in 20% effort to get the 80% result on that remaining 20%. Now mathematically speaking, that will come out to something that's 96% done, right? You did your 80%. Somebody does their 80% on the 20% remains 1616 plus 80, 96%. Who will notice in the end that 4% of something is missing? Hardly ever. And maybe Even the first 8020 that you did on it, the work that you did alone, without delegating it to someone else was good enough as well. But if not, try delegating that to someone else. So if you employ these three things, you can without doubt, I've experienced it myself. So have my clients complete your work up to five times faster. Look for the leverage points. Look for the 8020 in all that you do the 20% that will drive 80% of the results. Restrict your time. Remember, Parkinson's Law work will expand to fill the time given for its completion. And if you still have some work left to be done on a particular project or task, rather than try to do it yourself, see if you can delegate that to someone else. These three things in combination should significantly improve the rate at which you complete your work. So I hope you've enjoyed that. And if you head over to my website@ericpartaker.com if you. You can also subscribe to my weekly Peak Performance Insights newsletter.